Current Affairs

Recently, two new proposals that would supposedly allow us to create embryonic stem cells without destroying embryos have been getting a fair amount of attention. They were presented at Friday’s meeting of the President’s Council on Bioethics, whose Chairman, Leon Kass, said: “If this pans out scientifically, it will be a major step forward. It may provide an opportunity to get through the political impasse.” It would be wonderful if there were a way to create embryonic stem cells without destroying embryos. For one thing, it would end the political stalemate over funding embryonic stem cell research; for another, even I, who do not believe that killing a six-day-old embryo is morally unacceptable, would much rather not kill such embryos if it can possibly be avoided. Unfortunately, I don’t think either of these proposals will do the trick.

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The branch of the homebuilding company, Mercedes Homes, operating in Brevard County Florida, writes into the fine print of their contracts that customers cannot complain about inferior construction to their neighbors. They actually filed a lawsuit against one woman for doing so:

Jay Ann Contardi couldn’t imagine a problem any worse than the deluge of rainwater pouring into her leaking home. That is, until she ran afoul of the aggressive lawyers representing her builder, Mercedes Homes.

"It has changed my life. I’m afraid to talk to my neighbors. I’m afraid to walk my daughter to the bus stop. I’m afraid to talk to you right now," she told NewsChannel 2 reporter Dan Billow.

She’s not the only one. Other Mercedes homeowners asked us to protect their identities.

"I feel like I’m in a police state. I can’t do anything. I have no avenues. I have nowhere to turn," one homeowner said. That’s what it feels like when you’re sued for talking to your neighbor.

In the company’s plush corporate offices, executives hatched a plan to make buyers sign away their First Amendment rights.

"It’s there in black and white. The customer should read his or her contract thoroughly before they enter into it," said Patrick Roche, Mercedes Attorney.

When you buy a Mercedes home, the fine print says you can’t complain to your neighbors, call the news media or even carry a picket sign, even if your new quarter-million dollar home leaks through the roof, walls and windows.

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Academics are, on the whole, more liberal than the population at large. I would be interested to know why this is so, and what effects, if any, it has. I don’t usually find conservative reporting on this subject illuminating, since it generally doesn’t go beyond reporting anecdotes which, while bad, are not obviously more than occasional episodes of the sort that one would expect, human nature being what it is. (Nor is it obvious to me that a disproportionate number of cases of professorial bad behavior involve politics: I knew a professor once who spent the better part of a class making fun of a student for not drinking beer at parties. Really.) It is amusing to see conservatives responding with the sort of horrified cries of victimhood that they disapprove of in other contexts, e.g. those involving racism and sexism; but it’s not particularly enlightening.

An article by John Fund looked as though it might be an exception: it actually cites studies and not just anecdotes, for instance. But on closer examination it’s not. To start with, the studies themselves don’t seem to prove much. Of the three Fund cites, two just claim that a disproportionate number of professors are Democrats, which says little about why this is so or what effects it has. But a third claims to do more. Here’s how Fund describes it:

“A forthcoming study by Stanley Rothman of Smith College looked at a random sample of more than 1,600 undergraduate faculty members from 183 institutions of higher learning. He found that across all faculty departments, including business and engineering, academics were over five times as likely to be liberals as conservatives.

Mr. Rothman used statistical analysis to determine what factors explained how academics ended up working at elite universities. Marital status, sexual orientation and race didn’t play a statistically significant role. Academic excellence, as measured by papers published and awards conferred, did. But the next best predictor was whether the professor was a liberal. To critics that argue his methodology is flawed, Mr. Rothman points out that he used the same research tools long used in courts by liberal faculty members to prove race and sex bias at universities. Liberals criticizing his methods may find themselves hoist by their own petard.”

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UPDATE: This nonsense is spreading:

Alternate Evolution Theory OK’d for Teaching

With a vote last month, the school board in rural south-central Pennsylvania community is believed to have become the first in the nation to mandate the teaching of "intelligent design", which holds that the universe is so complex that it must have been created by an unspecified higher power.

Critics call the change in the ninth-grade biology curriculum a veiled attempt to require public schoolchildren to learn creationism, a biblical-based view that credits the origin of species to God.

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From Texas and Georgia come disturbing stories of how religious beliefs are changing what students in public shools are being taught. From Pharyngula:

It must be sad and hard to be a textbook in Texas.

Last year, the school board was trying to cut evolution out of them.

This year, they’re removing references to pollution, global warming, and overpopulation.

Oh, and the phrase “married partners” is not to be used, because it’s too general and could include gay couples.

And health/sex ed books contain no mention of contraception. At all. Did you know that Texas is the #1 ranked state for teen pregnancy? I guess it’s like football: they’re going to hang onto that championship.

Continue reading that story. It’s an alarming tale of one fanatic’s (Terri Leo) crusade to rewrite the state’s textbooks with her own religious views. (My personal favorite is: She’s been working like a maniac to gut textbooks; she’s even tried to get publishers to add little “facts”, like “Opinions vary on why homosexuals, lesbians and bisexuals as a group are more prone to self-destructive behaviors like depression, illegal drug use, and suicide.”)

But things in Georgia are little better:

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Via a website with a name that violates the posting rules (warning, site is highly offensive…click through at your own risk). And for the record, the author of that site is a lunatic…I just believe in citing my sources.
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As the culture wars rage on, one of the themes we hear again and again is that conservatives place more importance on family values than liberals do. That’s why conservatives are more likely to want to ban gay marriage, in order to protect their families, or so they say. The fact that Massachusetts, the state the conservatives love to hate, has the lowest divorce rate in the nation has been making the rounds lately, but as divorcemag.com illustrates with this table, it’s not just Massachusetts. Nine of the 10 states with the lowest divorce rates are Blue states:

1. Massachusetts
2. Connecticut
3. New Jersey
4. Rhode Island
5. New York
6. Pennsylvania
7. Wisconsin
8. North Dakota
9. Maryland
10. Minnesota

But wait…there’s more. Ten of the bottom 10 states are Red states.

1. Florida
2. New Mexico
3. Idaho
4. Alabama
5. Indiana
6. Wyoming
7. Tennessee
8. Oklahoma
9. Arkansas
10. Nevada

And more than just Red states, nine* at least 5 of the bottom 10 are Bible Belt States.

Aside from the quickie-divorce Mecca of Nevada, no region of the United States has a higher divorce rate than the Bible Belt. Nearly half of all marriages break up, but the divorce rates in these southern states are roughly 50 percent above the national average.

These are the same people who claim that my marrying my fiance will threaten their marriages. Any scapegoat in a storm, eh?

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Professor Reynolds‘ Wall Street Journal article on the strange case of Vanessa Leggett — a freelance journalist who was jailed for refusing to turn over certain notes to the U.S. Justice Department — seems to contain a minor legal inaccuracy. The article reads in relevant part:

Contrary to frequent assertions from professional journalists, there is no special First Amendment protection for members of the press. Such protections, to the extent they exist at all, exist only as a matter of statutory or regulatory grace. Under the First Amendment, everyone enjoys the same protection as “professional journalists.” Ms. Leggett probably had First Amendment grounds for refusing to turn over all of her notes, but not for refusing to testify to a grand jury, and not for refusing to make her notes available for copying (rather than seizure). Her refusal to testify may make her a heroine to journalists, but it does not make her a First Amendment heroine.

Now, (1) this isn’t my area and (2) I think Professor Reynolds is mostly right. But he is also a bit wrong, if I recall correctly.

The relevant case — Branzburg v. Hayes, et al. — had four votes for Reynolds’ “no protection whatsoever” viewpoint, and four for the “at least some protection” approach (including one, by Justice Douglas, for the “I like my constitutional protections the way I like my condoms: total protection” approach.)

The fifth, deciding vote for “no protection” was cast by Justice Powell in a concurrence. This concurrence is crucial, and it’s not nearly as absolute as the plurality opinion for “no protection.” To the contrary, it seems to suggest that there are certain limited First Amendment protections for newsgathering. When Powell’s concurrence is added to the four “at least some protection” votes, it arguably creates a majority for the viewpoint that there are at least some narrow First Amendment protections for newsgathering.

The concurrence reads in whole (it’s short):

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Edward has penned a great note regarding Derrida, who passed away over last Friday, but I can’t let his death pass without comment from me. Frankly, I found Derrida to be a too-clever pain in the ass (a seven-point-five, for those using the Wittgenstein scale), but he was a fun pain in the ass — in a mind-frag kinda way. And, some of the problems that Derrida skirted around (Derrida, seemingly on principle, never really got around to “addressing” them) actually have some modicum of relevance in the real world.

How? Well, consider patent law.

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We’ve already had diplomats and former military commanders, more retired generals and admirals, Nobel laureates, eminent pediatricians, and others signing statements against President Bush and his policies — and those are just the ones that leapt to mind. Some of these are interesting: diplomats and former military generals, for instance, don’t organize to endorse candidates all that often, and I take the fact that they are doing it now as a sign of real alarm. But now comes the most unlikely group of all: Business School Professors have written a stinging letter to President Bush.

Now: Professors are a diverse and often unruly bunch, and attempts to generalize about them are usually a mistake. However, I will take the risk and say: Business School professors are, by and large, fairly conservative. The letter these B-School professors have written pulls no punches. After trying to excerpt it, I’ve decided to post the whole of it: the first two paragraphs here, the rest after the fold. These are very serious points made by very serious people.

Dear Mr. President:

As professors of economics and business, we are concerned that U.S. economic policy has taken a dangerous turn under your stewardship. Nearly every major economic indicator has deteriorated since you took office in January 2001. Real GDP growth during your term is the lowest of any presidential term in recent memory. Total non-farm employment has contracted and the unemployment rate has increased. Bankruptcies are up sharply, as is our dependence on foreign capital to finance an exploding current account deficit. All three major stock indexes are lower now than at the time of your inauguration. The percentage of Americans in poverty has increased, real median income has declined, and income inequality has grown.

The data make clear that your policy of slashing taxes – primarily for those at the upper reaches of the income distribution – has not worked. The fiscal reversal that has taken place under your leadership is so extreme that it would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. The federal budget surplus of over $200 billion that we enjoyed in the year 2000 has disappeared, and we are now facing a massive annual deficit of over $400 billion. In fact, if transfers from the Social Security trust fund are excluded, the federal deficit is even worse – well in excess of a half a trillion dollars this year alone. Although some members of your administration have suggested that the mountain of new debt accumulated on your watch is mainly the consequence of 9-11 and the war on terror, budget experts know that this is simply false. Your economic policies have played a significant role in driving this fiscal collapse. And the economic proposals you have suggested for a potential second term – from diverting Social Security contributions into private accounts to making the recent tax cuts permanent – only promise to exacerbate the crisis by further narrowing the federal revenue base.

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Warning: Not even an attempt to be PC ahead….

I believe that Politically Correct language has its uses in helping Americans practice tolerance. I believe tolerance is not a state of mind or a destination one reaches, but rather a process one practices throughout one’s entire life, especially in those times when predjudice, bigotry, or simply slopping thinking seem easier. To avoid inadvertently hurting others, you need to stay vigilant about what you say.

Then again, there are those times when you need to whip out your membership card, snap your fingers, pop your neck, and get real on some sad deluded homos. Like these ones:

The Abe Lincoln Black Republican Caucus (ALBRC), a group of young urban Black gay Republicans, voted today in a special call meeting in Dallas, Texas, to endorse President Bush for re-election.

The ALBRC was co-founded by Don Sneed, a member of the Log Cabin Republicans, to address the political issues and needs of young Black gay Republicans, who he says: “Our voices are never heard, yet we exist and are growing in numbers.” The endorsement was fueled by the Log Cabin Republicans’ refusal to endorse President Bush. “We think that the ‘Republican Tent’ is inclusive and there is room for differences, but one does not pick up their marbles and go home if there are a few points of disagreement,” stated Anthony Falls, Republican Precinct Chairman — Dallas and the ALBRC National Spokesperson. “The ALBRC does not support marriage for gays, yet we do support and call for recognition of domestic partnerships,” he stated.

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